1. Taylor, "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?"
PHIL 219
Taylor, "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?"

2. Charles Taylor (b. 1931)
Taylor is one of, if not the most, renowned Canadian philosopher.
He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and stayed to earn a D.Phil., studying under Berlin.
He later succeeded Berlin as the Chichele Professor at Oxford before returning to Canada where he spent most of his career as a professor at McGill University, where he is still a professor emeritus.

3. Taylor's Work
Taylor is well known for his contributions to social and political philosophy, but his work ranges broadly. He's made significant contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of the social sciences. He's an influential interpreter of Hegel and 20th Century phenomenological hermeneutics. His more recent work has been in the philosophy of religion.
In addition to his philosophical work, he's been active in Canadian politics, running for office on multiple occasions as a member of the New Democrat party (social democrats).
His political philosophy is characterized by a critique of classical liberalism from a communitarian standpoint.
The essay we're reading today has no significant communitarian elements, so we'll take communitarianism up in a few meetings.

4. "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?"
In the essay we read for today, Taylor is responding to the distinction Berlin makes between negative and positive freedom. 
While Taylor believes that the distinction has merit, it is he believes far too often made based on exagerated statements of the terms.
As we saw in Berlin, positive freedom is often presented as if it were identical to totalitarian communism, ignoring the many versions of the concept for which such totalitarianism would be foreign (including classical Republicanisms like Aristotle's or Machiavelli's, Rousseau's version of social contractarianism, or Mill's treatment of representative democracy).
There's also a caricature of negative freedom, one often associated with Hobbes or more currently with Libertarianism, which insists that freedom can only mean total lack of external constraint on individual choice. This presentation ignores an important motive for defending freedom; namely, the role freedom plays in individual self-realization, which can be thwarted by both external and internal constraints.

5. A "Strange Assymetry"
While caricaturing happens on both sides of the distinction, Taylor notes the interesting fact that while the caricaturing of positive freedom is done by its critics, the caricaturing of negative freedom is done by its defenders.
According to Taylor, this is explained by the fact that, as we saw with Berlin, the fear of totalitarianism so strongly motivates many defenders of negative liberty that they willingly distort and limit the signficance of their account in order to draw a hard line around the independence of the individual to protect it from totalitarian interference.
Taylor believes that this is an overreaction dependent on a significant misunderstanding of the significance of both positive and negative accounts of freedom, and his essay is an attempt to correct this misunderstanding.

6. A New Distinction
The first step in this effort is to reconsider the ground of the distinction between positive and negative liberty.
Developing the initial distinction offered by Berlin, Taylor suggests the following distinction:
Theories of positive freedom emphasize, "...the exercising of control over one's life...The concept of freedom here is an exercise-concept" (900c2).
Theories of negative freedom emphasize zones of non-interference, they "...rely simply on an opportunity-concept, where being free is a matter of what we can do...whether or not we do anything to exercise these options" (Ibid.).
However, this distinction is not as clear cut as it at first glance seems. According to Taylor, if the goal of self-realization is considered, it becomes clear that no account of freedom that is solely opportunity-concept focussed is workable.
Thus, theories like Berlin's are mixed theories, ones where opportunity and exercise are both articulated (think, for example, of Berlin's discussion of compulsory education).
In contrast, there is nothing inconsistent with a purely exercise-concept approach. So, contary to Berlin, positive freedom seems like the more fundamental notion.

7. Understandable, but Indefensible
Given the concerns defenders of negative freedom have about the dangers of totalitarianism, their emphasis on opportunity makes sense, “It naturally seems more prudent to fight the Totalitarian Menace at this last-ditch position, digging in behind the natural frontier of this simple issue, rather than engaging the enemy on the open terrain of exercise-concepts…” (901c1).
However, as Taylor sees it, not only does this retrenchment deprive classical liberals of important means to defend liberal ideals based on shared conceptions of the good, but more importantly, the strict opportunity-concept approach, “…is indefensible as a view of freedom” (Ibid.).
This is so because the exercise of even negative freedom requires capacities like self-awareness, self-control, and moral choice, capacities which a purely external account of freedom can’t address.

8. Missing Motivations
In other words, what purely negative accounts of freedom ignore are the motivational structures which make substantive choice possible.
Real, political choice doesn’t take place in a vacuum. There are always contextual features of the choice that require negotiation and discernment. Reflection on motivational systems is an essential element of that negotiation.
Taylor uses the example of the contrast between (1970s) England and Albania. In England, religious freedom is central to the political context, but there are all sorts of (relatively) trivial restrictions that people have to negotiate daily. In Albania, there is no religious freedom but there are far fewer daily impositions on freedom of movement.
From the strict negative freedom standpoint, Albania seems preferable, but that can’t be right.

9. Yes to both
Taylor ultimately wants to argue that any politically workable account of freedom has to reference both exercise and opportunity concepts.
Concern for negative freedom is important, but it can only coherently proceed in the context of a consideration of the exercise of choice consistent with both internal and external constraints, “I must be actually exercising self-understanding in order to be truly free. I can no longer understand freedom just as an opportunity concept” (910c1).